I was reading about how in our modern world we are lacking rituals that mark the stages of life, especially rituals that mark the stage where children become adults. I don’t know what it is like for men and I can’t speak to what it is like for others on the gender spectrum. However, as a woman, even without ritual, it is impossible to not mark the change from being a girl to a woman because of the menstrual period starting and the changes to the body that come with it.
For me, that transition never really worked well because of my mother. I never felt like my body was normal. She was constantly taking me to doctors to see why I wasn’t regular and to see what was wrong with me. The doctors never did really find anything wrong. It’s a terrible thing to feel like I failed at being a woman from the very beginning. I even found myself having to study and figure it out for myself after I got married because I had no real good role models for what it meant for real; all I had were fairy tale images and ideals of what it should be like, not what it really was like.
Lately, I have been seeing all these images of motherhood because Mother’s Day is coming up. When I really think about it, I think I have been seeing it all wrong. In Christianity, we hold the Virgin Mary separate and holy. She is up high in the clouds away from us, surrounded by light and something to be revered. Yet if we think about mother in term of nature and the world, then she isn’t something up high and away from us, she is something connected to us. She is something that gives us life and she is all around us. When I studied being a woman, I looked at Mary and I realized back then, she wasn’t this ideal of perfection to be held up high, but instead she was supposed to be a mother, someone who stood right there in the thick of things when everything got difficult. When Jesus was on the cross, she was there. She didn’t run away. More importantly she didn’t act perfectly. She felt upset and in pain like any mother would; she suffered for her child.
I never became a mother, but as a woman, I think that there’s no reason any of us should be held to a greater standard or held in a different place than anyone else. We are all equal, we are all born, we all live, and we all die. Mothers give life in much the same way that the earth gives us life. They are one with nature. If we choose to honor mothers, I want to honor them for being in the trench of life, for suffering with and for their children, and not trying to exist as some idealized woman to be honored just one day a year.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
